Welcome to the Burack Lab

The Burack Laboratory is exploring whether the level of activation induced cytidine deaminase (AID) activity in Follicular lymphoma (FL) tumors can be used as a prognostic factor to identify FL patients who are more likely to transform into Diffuse Large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).

Our hypothesis is that ongoing AID activity would be expressed as a high degree of tumor heterogeneity, and once any individual clone received a growth potentiating mutation, it would become the predominant cell type within the tumor and transform into DLBCL.

By using the high sequence coverage depth available with next-generation sequencing technology, we hope to approach the measurement of genomic variability at the level of approximately 0.1 – 1%, a much higher sensitivity than obtainable with traditional Sanger sequencing.

The long term goals of this study include:

1. Estimation of the total amount of AID-mediated mutation within the LN from FL patients
2. Estimation of relative amounts of genes mutations found in high vs low fidelity DNA repair.
3. Determining whether parameters vary within the FL populations and their effectiveness as prognostic factors.
4. Determining whether DNA from formalin-fixed, paraffin embedded tissues can be used for these studies.